Chevrolet Cobalt LS 2013

Depois dos modelos de Fiat e VW, agora é um Chevrolet que se adapta à já famosa resolução do Contran. Incorporar airbag duplo e freios ABS à versão LS faz o sedã compacto passar a sair de fábrica com tais itens em todas as configurações que oferece. Outra notícia interessante é que não houve acréscimo de preço, o que lhe permite continuar somando ar-condicionado, banco traseiro bipartido, chave canivete, direção hidráulica, interior em dois tons e rodas de aço aro 15” por R$ 39.980, sempre com o motor 1.4 flex.

Read more > Chevrolet Cobalt LS 2013

Renault Kangoo 2013

Some months ago, everyone turned the spotlights to Mercedes-Benz and the latest member of its commercial vehicles’ line, the badge-engineered Citan. But this release also brought the memory that Kangoo, the French multivan whose project was used to create the German sibling, was completing four years at the current generation without having any style changes. Renault now takes the opportunity to give some updates which may not create design revolutions, but have a great importance to the car’s market position.

Do you know what does “kangoo” stand for? This word doesn’t have any meaning, actually. Renault used a computer program to create random pronounceable letter combinations until they liked this one, which they used to baptize their very first multivan, which came in 1998 to fight this category’ pioneers, PSA’s Citroën Berlingo and Peugeot Partner, and Fiat Doblò a few years later. But if the French twins tried to look like a conventional car as much as possible, the other two wanted to stand out in the crowd: like the Italian rival, the first Kangoo used very creative shapes and bright colors to compose a playful appearance, rather than discreet. But they all agreed to offer huge space for people and/or cargo (there were several body options) with resistant structures and inexpensive trim levels, which didn’t take long to result at a very successful quartet. They’ve started to receive the second generation around the tenth year, in which PSA only upgraded the original concept, while Fiat made Doblò much more elegant. Renault, in turn, decided to evolve Kangoo’s initial idea. The pictures show a more solid version of the first generation’s design, maintaining vivid colors and shapes but also receiving a new option: named Be Bop for passengers or Compact for cargo, it has smaller height and wheelbase, achieving a “cuter design” which makes it more suitable for companies with lighter demands.

And after shrinking at the beginning, this generation received the electric Z.E. version and ended with an enlargement: the second Grand Kangoo was also an extended-wheelbase option for both uses, but also like the first one there was a big surprise concerning the design: having the cost reduction as a priority resulted at very questionable design solutions, such as brutally stretched last columns at the first and rear fenders at the second. Nevertheless, worrying about award-winning designs or not is what creates the biggest difference between Kangoo and Scénic, to keep the comparisons in Renault’s showroom. These pictures show the rational van of those, and that’s why there weren’t great investments at this facelift. The entire front was restyled in order to syncronize this car with Renault’s current design language, which includes big headlights and the already famous V-shaped grille highlighting the brand’s logo – the Z.E. version adds the blue-chrome details seen at the photos and sets the charging port under the logo. Internally, there’s new dashboard and the R-Link infotainment system. Since this car focuses at the commercial use, there’s only one gasoline engine option, the 1.2 TCe – all the others use diesel, generating from 75 to 110 hp.

02/28/2012 update: Now it was time for releasing the facelifted Kangoo’s passenger version, after commercial and electric variations. The visual changes are the exact same here, but restricted to the medium-wheelbase vehicle, which has also received two new trim levels: besides Life, Zens and Intens there will be Business and Extrem. The first one is focused on companies, while the second deserved to appear in the most recent official pictures. Like PSA has done with Citroën Berlingo XTR and Peugeot Partner Tepee, now it’s Renault’s time to offer an “off-road inspiration” for this multivan, with 15” wheels, exclusive external stickers, chrome details and roof rack, while the cabin receives two-tone coating. It was also revealed that Kangoo will have hill-start assistance and stability control as standard items, with the R-Link infotainment system as an optional. The diesel engine options will actually be the same dCi 1.5L, with 75, 90 or 110 hp of power, while there will be only the 115-hp TCe with gasoline.

Read more > Renault Kangoo 2013

Mercedes-Benz Classe A

Muito já se falou sobre a reviravolta que os alemães iniciaram com o terceiro Classe A, não só na linha de sua própria marca como em todo o segmento dos compactos de luxo. Seu sucessso tanto com a mídia como com os compradores veio da enorme inovação que ele representa para a marca, não tanto pelo desenho mas sim por todo o novo conceito que este carro lhe traz. É por essas e outras razões que sua apresentação oficial ganhou todos os holofotes da última Top Night da Mercedes-Benz e o artigo que você está prestes a ler.

Esta “classe” em particular sempre esteve associada ao desejo dos alemães de explorar uma lacuna de mercado que se situa logo abaixo do famoso Classe C. Não em preço muito menor, porque isso implicaria em sair do setor de luxo, mas sim em um foco diferente. Porque por mais que o carro-chefe ganhasse novas carrocerias, pacotes de acessórios esportivos e versões de alto desempenho, nunca perderia a tradição de ser uma escala menor de Classe E e Classe S, e menos ainda toda a tradição que eles têm com a sobriedade. Buscar clientes diferentes é sempre interessante, mas é necessário saber como agradá-los. O primeiro Classe A chegou em 1997 inaugurando na marca o formato minivan em tamanho compacto, a tração dianteira e várias soluções de estilo esperáveis apenas em outras marcas, como a coluna traseira em formato de “Z”. Seu problema inicial não foi a quantidade de subversões, mas sim a forma como elas se aplicaram: o carro realmente era jovial, mas parecia feito por outra empresa. Pouco tempo depois do lançamento ainda houve o fatídico capotamento em um “teste do alce” feito por uma revista sueca, o que só ajudou a enterrar quaisquer chances de sucesso de um carro que, na ponta do lápis, resultava ser uma minivan compacta com espaço e motores similares ao da concorrência direta mas com um adicional de preço que não se via compensado pelo nível de requinte que trazia.

Em 2004 a Europa chegou a lhe dar uma segunda chance, mas não o Brasil. A nova geração trazia uma interpretação do estilo anterior muito mais adaptada aos padrões da marca, mas ainda não era o que os clientes desejavam. A marca só foi acertar de fato ao criar a Classe B, que por sua vez assumiu o conceito de minivan por completo. Isso permitiu o retorno da Classe A como um carro completamente diferente. Ele ganhou liberdade para se tornar o belo hatchback que ilustra este artigo, agora com foco muito maior na esportividade mas ainda sem nunca esquecer o DNA que tem: estão lá os vincos tão poucos como fortes, o típico caimento de teto e a frente que exalta a grade inspirada no 300 SL, mas aqui se combinam a elementos muito bem desenhados e de grande personalidade, criando um conjunto que, agora sim, tem potencial para disputar clientes com os rivais que surgiram nesse meio-tempo: Audi A3, BMW Série 1, Volvo V40 e até o Citroën DS4. O novo Classe A não tem qualquer parentesco com as gerações anteriores, mas sim com o irmão maior: a plataforma de tração dianteira foi inaugurada com Classe B, e pouco a pouco vem formando o que os alemães chamam de “nova família de entrada”: o mais novo membro é o sedã CLA, e para breve se espera a primeira aparição do crossover GLA. Todos focando em consolidar a vontade da Mercedes-Benz em oferecer uma alternativa mais casual aos seus modelos mais famosos.

Quanto às versões, o modelo deve estrear no Brasil como A200, primeiro nas opções Urban e Style e depois também na Sport. As duas primeiras são variações do seu pacote de entrada, cujo desenho dispensa o kit aerodinâmico visto na terceira. Porém, mesmo sua lista de itens mais básica será capaz de efetivar a intenção que a Mercedes tem com este carro: convencer compradores da categoria dos médios a esticar o financiamento e levar um carro de nível claramente superior. Itens como ar-condicionado digital, central multimídia, vários airbags ou sensores de chuva e crepuscular são presença obrigatória em sua faixa de preço (que está prevista para começar ao redor dos R$ 100 mil), mas este carro abre vantagem com os detalhes. Bancos mais anatômicos, encaixes silenciosos e precisos e materiais de boa qualidade são o que começa a cativar o público que chega a estas categorias de carro vindo de baixo. Mas todo o conforto desta cabine também permite desfrutar da performance que o novo Mercedes garante: seu arsenal de tecnologias de ponta faz o 1.6 turbo de 156 cv emprestado da B200 repetir as excelentes médias de consumo, mas também entrega força de sobra em acelerações mais fortes, sempre com câmbio automatizado de dupla embreagem e sete marchas. O início das vendas se fará em março, e mais tarde devem chegar as versões A250, com motor mais forte, e a tão falada A45 AMG, que usa tração integral e um 2.0 turbo de 340 cv.

Read more > Mercedes-Benz Classe A

The "Single-Slash Double-Dot" rule for identifying spam links in phishing emails

This article is about email phishing, and spam-links in emails: how you can recognize them and what to do about them.

Understanding Spam vs Phishing

Most people know what regular spam is. Phishing is a more sophisticated type of spam, which combines information that the spammer knows (or guesses) with conventional spam techniques. Often phishing emails are addressed directly to you, and offer a "product" or "service" that you might realistically want. For example, they may offer to fix a security problem with your on-line banking (just as soon as you have gone to their website and given them your real on-line banking details).

Bloggers are particularly susceptible to phishing emails, because we write websites where we share information about ourselves. For example, anyone who reads Blogger-hints-and-tips should have no trouble guessing that I use both Amazon Associates and Chitika, and that I have a domain hosted with DomainDiscount24.  It's not much harder to work out that I'm interested in folk-music, and know a lot about public transport in my city. And even though I don't display my email address on the blog, it isn't that hard to guess from some of the screen-shots I use, or by subscribing to my RSS feed.    And you might be even more vulnerable if you link your blog to your Facebook profile instead of a Page.

Protecting yourself from Phishers

ISPs and email services detect and delete most regular spam emails before they are delivered. But this is harder to do with phishing emails, because they often look genuine. So you need to protect yourself against phishing.

The best way to do this is to be curious-and-cautious about any email you receive. There are lots of suggestions below about what this means, and what characteristics to look for. None of them can give a 100% certain answer about whether a message or offer is dodgy. But being aware of the sort of things you need to check, and in particular the "single-slash-double-dot" rule for checking links, is a an excellent start.

How to spot phishing emails

An email message may be a phishing attempt if some of the following are true:

• You were not expecting the message, or any contact from the organisation it apparently comes from.

• You've never heard of the organisation or company that it comes from - or you don't have any dealings with them.
  (That said, sometimes unknown organisations do contact you - try to establish their legitimate website or phone number from another source, to check if they're "for real" or not).
  

• The message asks you to confirm account details by giving some personal information: no reputable company will ever want you to do this by email. Intelligent reputable companies will not expect you to do so by clicking on links in their website.

• The message tries to make you respond quickly, to stop something bad from happening. (Basically, they're trying to stop you from thinking about the message before you respond to it.)

• An email doesn't have your address in the To field - or it has your address and many others which you don't know.

• The message-body doesn't start with your name (eg if it says "Dear Customer" instead of "Dear Joe Soap")

• The from address, or the name as the bottom of the message (like the "signature" in a paper-based letter) is missing, or seems strange given where the message came from.

• Bad spelling. Bad grammar. Poor formatting. Odd looking graphics / pictures / logos. Strange sentence structures (either to try to trick you, or because the author doesn't know your language well).

None of those features guarantee that a message is dodgy. But any of them should be enough to make you a little suspicious.

But there are some features that are more of a give-away:

• The URL / hyperlink in the message isn't the right one for the company (eg it's from www.ebay.org instead of www.ebay.com)

• The message contains a link which doesn't match the website show when you hover the mouse over it eg www.amazon.com - notice that it's linked back to Blogger-HAT instead of to the real Amazon.
  NB Even if a link looks like a link, ALWAYS check where it goes to by hovering your mouse over and seeing what the "tool tip" text is.
  

• The message uses an URL shortening service (eg tinyurl.com, bit.ly, goo.gl) which stops you from checking where the link really goes.
  (This is a good reason why you shouldn't use link shortening services yourself:  they make it look like you have something to hide. Whenever I tweet about a post, I always put in the full URL: even though Twitter doesn't display all the characters in the message, they are available to anyone who hovers over the link).
  

A simple rule for evaluating links:

The last three points are the most helpful - but they rely on you being able to look at a website-link and know if it's spammy or not.

And spammers know that it's easy to confuse people by showing them long, complicated real links, that superficially look like real ones.  For example, consider

www.cnn.com.newslist.2013-01.headlines.trouble.com/headline-listing/xx03/index.html

Lots of people will look at this, see the "cnn.com" and think "ahh, that's a reliable news site, it must be fine."   But that's not actually true.

Fortunately there's a simple rule that you can use to find the real website that a link points to. It is

Single-Slash, Double-Dot

To use it, look at where the the link really goes (by hovering the mouse above it) and:

• Find the first single forward slash
• Look at the words between the two or three dots just before the slash
• Decide if the link is genuine, based on these words.

The Single-Slash Double-Dot rule explained

In the example above, the first single forward slash is actually half-way through the link:

www.cnn.com.newslist.2013-01.headlines.trouble.com/headline-listing/xx03/index.html

So the website that it is pointing to is actually trouble.com - which might not be a place that you want to visit.  Compare this with

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130129-blue-heart-of-the-planet

where the first single-slash is quite near the start, just before the very genuine www.bbc.com.

In summary, the website name between these two or three dots should match the one that is shown in the email, and should be the right one for the company. For example, one of these points to the real TradeMe, and one doesn't:

TradeMe 

TradeMe

(Yes they look the same:  remember you need to start by hovering your mouse over the links, to find out where they really point to.

Two vs three dots?

You sometimes have to check back three dots because some countries have two-level internet addresses. For example, instead of .com you will find

• .co.uk - in the United Kingdom (two level, so you need to check three dots)
• .com.au in Australia (again,two level, so you need to check three dots)
• .ie - in Ireland, (single-level, so you only need to check two dots).

So like the many internet security issues, there are still judgements you need to make, and knowledge you need to apply.   But still, it's fair to say that you can ...

Use the single-slash-double-dot rule to work out where the link in an email message really goes to.
[Tweet this quote].

What do to if an email or link is suspicious

With old-fashioned spam, the rule was always to delete the message, no questions asked.

With suspected phishing emails, it's a little harder.   You need to make a judgement:

• What are the chances that this is genuine?/

• What are the consequences if it is genuine, but I ignore it?

• Is there some other way that I can check out this out, without clicking on the link in the email? For instance by going directly to the banks' website by typing in the address myself - or by phoning the person to ask if they really did email me.

You need to weigh up these three factors, and based on them decide whether to investigate further (eg by going to the website directly, or emailing the sender for more information, whether to trust the email message, or to just delete it.

TL/DR:

Phishing emails use information about you to personalize spam.

Apply common sense and intuition to every email that you receive. Check that links go where they are supposed to - and don't click them if they don't.

Use the single-slash-double-dot rule to work out where the link in an email message really goes to. [Tweet this quote]

---

Related Articles:

Displaying email addresses on your blog

Offering an RSS feed

Linking your blog to your Facebook profile

How to make a "tweet this quote" option.

Read more > The "Single-Slash Double-Dot" rule for identifying spam links in phishing emails

Opel Zafira Tourer BiTurbo

This release isn’t more pleasant only as it was unexpected. Minivans are the most family-dedicated car category ever created, so they’re expected to receive items such as seven seats and DVD players for all of them. But what would be created if someone goes the other way and packs Zafira Tourer with a diesel 2.0 CDTi engine whose two turbines produce 195-hp power and 400-Nm torque, being capable of taking it from 0 to 60 mph in 8s9 and to a 135-mph top speed? According to Opel, nothing but the fastest minivan of its class.

Read more > Opel Zafira Tourer BiTurbo

Renault Clio Estate

Do you remember how this station wagon made its very first public appearance? It was around the last Paris Motor Show, right after the fourth Clio was showed. But while the hatchback was having its official worldwide release, the family-dedicated sibling was only glanced, in a backstage video published by Renault at that time to show more information of the new cars. Estate is now released in Europe, but it’s still worth taking a moment to observe how great turned to be this job performed by Renault.

Creating a car leads to deal with lots of conceptual decisions, way before starting to convert the design sketches into what will be manufactured. Each category demands a particular external size and has its particular competitors, so one of the biggest decision is on what subdivisions the car will compete – in other words, what variations it’ll receive. The strategy of deriving sedan, wagon, minivan, pick-up and other categories from a single car became famous around the 1980s, with cars like Opel Kadett E and Renault Mégane. Since the main idea here is to reduce costs by having cars from different categories sharing several parts, the initial examples used to change almost only the rear section. But in nowadays it’s necessary to deal with a much more competitive market, which demands each car to be as original and creative as it can possibly be, even when it’s “related” to others. That’s why even those are receiving more exclusive parts, inside and outside, achieving whole different variations. However, if sharing parts is the solution to save money, the simplest logic states that reducing those common items would result at more expensive cars. That’s why there are so many automakers working to make that sharing start from the very beginning of each project.

Besides having each time fewer platforms for more cars, another very important strategy is to project all the intended siblings from the beginning. Renault was criticized for the second-generation Clio because of the Turkish Symbol: this sedan variation had no previous planning on the hatchback’s project and also had to be cheap, which fatally resulted at a very unattractive design and bad sales outside its homeland. The third phase never had a sedan but tried to offer a station wagon for the first time, which was so well-accepted that is now succeeded by the gorgeous car of this article’s pictures. It’s clear that Clio Estate (or Grandtour, for some markets) isn’t a last-minute adaptation of the hatchback. It brings the same elegant sportiness, with smooth volumes, a very stylish front fascia and great attention to the details, such as the opulent-but-not-too-big tail lights, the same hidden back handles as in the hatchback and all the columns with black paint but the front ones: the roof ends up like it’s floating over the windows, which in turn seem all connected. This car will offer the same items as Clio, which includes R-Link infotainment system and Bass Reflex audio, but with 443L to 1.380L at the trunk. With diesel it’ll use a dCi 1.5L with 75 or 90 hp, and with gasoline a 75-hp 1.2L or the TCe Energy 1.2L with 90 hp. The prices go from € 14.300 to € 20.500.

Read more > Renault Clio Estate

Kia Cee’d and Pro_cee’d GT

Once again the European passion for hot hatches has been satisfied. The mid-sized hatchback will receive the high-performance version both in four and two doors, with a beautiful complete aerodynamic kit, featuring bigger grilles, red calipers and impressive 18” exclusive wheels, not to mention the cabin with Recaro sporty seats, aluminum items and several red details. The turbocharged GDI 1.6L uses direct injection to produce 200 hp, which leads to the 0-60 mph completed in 7s9, always using a six-speed manual transmission.

Read more > Kia Cee’d and Pro_cee’d GT